Office of Taxonomic Reconciliation

The Office of Taxonomic Reconciliation is the constituent bureau of the Reconciliation Apparatus charged with the alignment of category to specimen and specimen to category, in that order of priority. It occupies the eastern third of Floor 4,118 and maintains a small annex on the stairhead above it, from which a clerk may observe arrivals without being observed. Its founding instrument, the Corrigendum to Clause 9, was drafted in the winter of the fourth recension and remains the office's governing text, though it has been amended eleven times and read in full twice.

The office is not to be confused with the Office of Onomastic Reconciliation, which concerns itself with names rather than categories, nor with the Office of Systematic Attribution, which holds that the two cannot be separated and has said so in print. Relations between the three bodies are correct.

Mandate and method

The Office of Taxonomic Reconciliation resolves disputes arising where a specimen has been filed under a category that subsequent inspection has shown to be the wrong one, or where a category has been found to contain a specimen it did not anticipate. Its method is documentary. A reconciliation is effected when the office issues a Schedule of Alignment, which names the specimen, names the category, and states the grounds on which the two are held to correspond. Schedules are numbered consecutively and have never been numbered consecutively.

The office does not move specimens. That is a matter for the Office of Spatial Reconciliation, and the boundary between the two is the most litigated frontier in the Apparatus. The Office of Taxonomic Reconciliation holds that a specimen in the wrong place is nonetheless correctly placed if the category is amended to match it; the Spatial office holds that a specimen in the wrong place is in the wrong place. The dispute has produced forty-one joint memoranda and no settlement. A standing instruction, posted at the annex stairhead and renewed each quarter, requires that any specimen handled under joint procedure be weighed before and after and the two weights entered in the Schedule. The instruction has never been rescinded; it has also never been explained.

The Corrigendum of Clause 9

Clause 9 of the Third Concordance had provided that a category, once assigned, "shall not thereafter be divided against itself." The clause was widely read as a prohibition on reclassification, which for a century paralysed the office entirely. The Corrigendum to Clause 9 resolved the difficulty by distinguishing between a category divided against itself and a category divided against its contents, the latter being permitted and, in the view of the drafting committee, "ordinary."

"What is forbidden is the category that contradicts its own definition. What is permitted is the category that contradicts its neighbours, its history, or its specimens, provided the contradiction is recorded."

— Corrigendum to Clause 9, preamble

The distinction was received with relief by the office and with suspicion by the Taxonomic Purist School, which argues that a category divided against its contents is simply a category divided against itself at one remove, and that the Corrigendum has licensed an infinite regress of reclassification under a change of preposition. The School's position is set out at length in Purist Tract 12. The office has not replied to Tract 12, on the ground that a reply would constitute a reconciliation of the disagreement, which would be improper.

Taxonomic Series 44.312.07

The office's most cited instrument is Taxonomic Series 44.312.07, inherited from the now-defunct Bureau of Pragmatic Reconciliation under its final memorandum. Series 44.312.07 governs the treatment of specimens that have been catalogued twice under different descriptions. It provides that the earlier description prevails unless the later one is demonstrably better, and defines "demonstrably better" across nine annexes, the ninth of which was added in the fourth recension and is one sentence long: "Better is a matter of the record, not of the specimen."

The Taxonomic Realists, who emerged from the Bureau's procedural memos, treat Series 44.312.07 as their founding text and have built a substantial literature upon the ninth annex. The Office of Taxonomic Reconciliation regards the Realists as a filiation of its own work and has twice attempted to schedule them. Both attempts failed on procedural grounds: a Schedule of Alignment cannot name a school of thought as a specimen, and the office has declined to amend its own instrument to permit it, on the principle that instruments are amended only when the alternative is worse.

Floor 4,118 and the Winter Schedule

The office's difficulties are concentrated in the eastern stacks, where categories are shelved by affinity rather than by number, and where affinity is assessed by the duty clerk. In the winter of the fourth recension, a clerk named Emeric Voss — remembered chiefly for the grievance he lodged against the office that employed him — reconciled the contents of Stacks 6 through 11 on the understanding that affinity ran vertically. It does not. Affinity in the eastern stacks runs toward the stairwell. The error went undetected for two hundred and six days, during which ninety-four Schedules of Alignment were issued and countersigned, and was discovered only when a visiting inspector from the Office of Unitary Reconciliation attempted to retrieve a specimen and found the shelf empty, the category full, and both parties satisfied.

The office's response was administrative rather than corrective. It introduced the Winter Schedule, under which reconciliations are suspended between the first frost and the thaw, on the reasoning that errors committed in winter are harder to trace. Voss's grievance — that the Winter Schedule was introduced to conceal his own error rather than to prevent others — was heard by the Office of Procedural Reconciliation under Procedural Bulletin 88 and dismissed, on the ground that a schedule introduced after an error cannot be said to have caused it. Voss was reassigned to the annex stairhead. He is understood to have kept the weights himself.

Relations with the Apparatus

The office's position within the Reconciliation Apparatus is secure but narrow. It consults the Office of Temporal Reconciliation where a category has changed across recensions and the question arises which version of the category a specimen was in when it was filed; Temporal Findings on this point are authoritative and, by the Temporal office's own account, provisional. It consults the Office of Luminous Reconciliation only where a specimen cannot be inspected, which is more often than the schedules suggest. It defers to the Office of Onomastic Reconciliation on all matters of name and is careful not to describe this deference as a policy, since a policy would require the Corrigendum to be amended a twelfth time.

Proposals to merge the office with the Office of Systematic Attribution are raised at each recension and withdrawn at each recension, generally by the proposer. The Chamber of Onomastic Reconciliation has ruled twice that the two offices have distinct lineages and may not be consolidated without a ruling on which lineage would survive. No one has requested the ruling. The office continues to occupy the eastern third of Floor 4,118, to issue Schedules of Alignment under the Corrigendum, and to weigh what passes through the annex, before and after.

Selected holdings

• Corrigendum to Clause 9 — founding instrument; eleven amendments.
• Taxonomic Series 44.312.07 — inherited from the Bureau of Pragmatic Reconciliation, memorandum BPR/44.312.07.
• Purist Tract 12 — adverse; unreplied.
• Winter Schedule — suspension of reconciliations, first frost to thaw.
• Voss Grievance — dismissed under Procedural Bulletin 88.